Speaker bio: Ophelia Eglène holds an MA in European studies from the Institut des Hautes Etudes Européennes at the Université Robert Schuman in Strasbourg, France and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University at Albany, State University of New York. She did her postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University.

Ophelia Eglène’s teaching interests include European integration, International Political Economy, and French politics. She teaches in the Political Science Department and the French Department at Middlebury College. Her research interests are the European Economic and Monetary Union, EU environmental policy, and the transatlantic relations. She is the author of Banking on Sterling: Britain’s Independence from the Eurozone which was published in 2011 by Rowman & Littlefield. She is currently a visiting scholar at the European Union Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her Scholar-in-Residence position is supported in part through an EU Center of Excellence grant from the European Union.

Abstract: During the Maastricht Treaty negotiations in the early 1990s, the members of the European Union committed to launching the euro at the turn of the century which meant abolishing their national currencies and losing sovereignty in monetary policy. Britain had a more cautious attitude and negotiated an opt-out which would grant the UK the freedom to decide if and when to join the euro zone. Ophelia Eglene will present the empirical findings of her book Banking on Sterling: Britain’s Independence from the Eurozone, which show that the conflicting interests of the business and financial sectors had an impact on the deliberations of the British government on whether to adopt the single currency.